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Well, my exact phrasing was "The Linux kernel now faces a similar problem if it would wish to adopt a different licence than the GPL version 2 (and no later version)." What I meant was that if at any given time, they would prefer to use a different licence, not necessarily the GPLv3, they would need to ask permission from all the copyright holders, or re-write their code.

I know of several projects that have changed licensing this way: Mozilla which converted from the MPL to a triple MPL/LGPL/GPL lice

Note that the figure of 905 authors probably does not derive from a full blame analysis, in which case it is quite likely that no code remains from a number of minor contributors, which would make the task somewhat less monumental than that number might suggest.

Well, a linewise "blame"/"annotate" feature is not an accurate way to determine ownership. For example, let's say I added a huge patch to the perldoc pods adding several sections, and lots of text. My patch as applied.

Afterwards, someone noticed that all my lines had trailing whitespace, and submitted a patch to remove them. This patch was submitted, and all of my added lines are now marked as his changed lines. As a result, the line-wise blame command will claim I'm not a contributor, while in fact
I

You are arguing about specific trees, whereas I am talking about the forest: that it is quite likely that the number of contributors who can actually claim copyright today is probably not quite as high as a thousand people.